Fiction post-1989

The Frank Elder Trilogy

Flesh & Blood, William Heinemann, 2005

Awarded CWA Silver Dagger for Fiction & The Barry Award (US) for Best British Crime Novel of the Year

After the break up of his marriage, Frank Elder has quit his job as a Detective Inspector in the Nottinghamshire Force and retired to an isolated cottage in Cornwall. The past, however, refuses to leave him alone, and when one of the young men suspected of being involved in the unsolved disappearance of 16-year old Susan Blacklock is released from prison, Elder sets out on a cold case investigation that brings his own teenage daughter into mortal danger.

“Flesh and Blood is a superb mystery – excrutiatingly suspenseful, rich in character and all too real in its depiction of the horrific possibilities lurking in the margins of the mundane. The bloodless betrayal revealed at the very end of this story is more shocking in its cruel malevolence that any of the gruesome acts of violence that preceded it.”Maureen Corrigan, Washington Postamazon.co.uk amazon.com

Detective Sergeant Maddy Birch, with whom Frank Elder once shared a few moments of illicit passion,is involved in the take down of a violent criminal which goes bloodily wrong, and in the messy fall out she starts to feel her own life is in danger. Meantime, Elder is summoned back to Nottingham, where his daughter, Katherine, is running wild.

“Harvey’s book is fast, fluent and exciting, with a pace and assurance that never let up. It’s like hearing a fine jazz musician hitting the right tune, the right key, the right tempo. Turning the pages you can taste the confidence.”Philip Oakes, Literary Review

Once again, Elder is drawn from his Cornish hideaway when his estranged wife, Joanne, asks him to help a friend find her widowed sister, who has gone mysteriously missing. What Elder finds is a quicksand of memories, at the centre of which is a murder that was never solved.

“Harvey writes superbly about the stoppings and startings that define human relationships, whether within the bounds of acceptable behaviour or criminally outside them. He makes us feel the connections between people on both sides of the law – or both sides of sanity – in a way that is both profoundly moving and deeply upsettling. Harvey belongs on the short list of every reader interested in the demilitarised zone where crime fiction and literature meet.”